Women invited to stand on empty statue base as YWCA takes aim at monumental gender gap

Addressing a monumental gender gap There's a new initiative encouraging women to take their rightful place on the pedestal.

Statues are meant to honour and tell the stories of leaders and community builders, but an examination of the monuments in Vancouver reveals a startling lack of diversity.

According to YWCA Metro Vancouver, just 12 per cent of monuments across the country depict women.

“Statues of course tell our history as a country and as a community, and we know that women have been an integral part of building our communities and building our nation,” said Amy Juschka, the organization’s director of communications and advocacy.

In the town that bears his name, Captain George Vancouver’s statue stands regally in front of city hall.

Lord Stanley of Preston welcomes visitors to the city’s crown jewel, his namesake park, with arms open wide in his statue.

Even Scottish poet Robert Burns, who never set foot in Vancouver, has a statue perched on a hill in Stanley Park with commanding views of Coal Harbour.

In contrast, people must walk on the roadway on Stanley Park Drive to access a dried up fountain with a bronze engraving of Queen Victoria.

And a monument to poet and author Pauline Johnson, which features her face in relief, sits in a small clearing in a stand of trees adjacent to the parking lot at Third Beach.

Neither monument is on the scale of the statues that depict men as strong and powerful.

That’s why the YWCA set up an empty statue base at Canada Place and invited anyone who identifies as female to take their rightful place atop the pedestal.

The initiative is called Reserved For Her and is meant to highlight the lack of monuments to women.

“That’s why there’s no statue on this base,” said Juschka. “We want women to step up. We want them to step forward and we want them to tell their stories.”

The statue base will be in place until the end of the month and people are encouraged to upload their pictures to social media using the hashtag #ReservedForHer.

Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week founder Joleen Mitton was one of the first to stand atop the statue base for a photo shoot.

“It’s just really nice to see the initiative bringing women to the forefront,” she said. ”Growing up, I never saw women’s statues.”

There are a handful of statues depicting women in Vancouver, including an angel carrying a fallen soldier near Waterfront Station, and Girl in a Wetsuit, a sculpture perched atop a large rock in Burrard Inlet near the Stanley Park Seawall.

Neither of those examples depicts a real person.

According to a City of Vancouver description, a statue of a woman sitting on a bench in Devonian Harbour Park near the intersection of West Georgia and Denman Streets “is a finely detailed realistic depiction of a woman looking in her purse.”

“There are so many real-life women that are doing incredible things in our community and we need to recognize and celebrate them,” said Juschka.

Back at Canada Place, Mitton, a former international fashion model, had some advice for girls and women taking their turn for a photo on the pedestal.

“I would say just live it up. Have a good time with it,” Mitton said. “It’s a beautiful idea to able to showcase strong Indigenous people and strong women in general. Have fun with it.”